Previously in the ‘Course Cosmology’ Series:
Intro to ‘Course Cosmology’ — A Look at Resistance to Theism and Masculine Pronouns in A Course in Miracles
Transcript: The ForgiveNest Podcast for A Course in Miracles, ACIM ‘Course Cosmology’ Series, Part 4: The Holy Spirit - God's Answer to the Ego, with Alison Anton
Hello, and welcome back to ‘Course Cosmology’, Part 4, The Holy Spirit. I'm Alison Anton with the ForgiveNest Podcast for A Course in Miracles.
If you haven't yet watched the first three parts, please watch those first because I designed the series to be viewed in order, each one building off the previous.
We concluded Part 3 on ‘The Sleeping Son’ and the separation. This part is on God's solution to the separation; the answer or the path that leads to awakening from it. That answer is the Holy Spirit, our Teacher who leads us out.
Our Choice to Wake Up
I thought we'd start with this passage because it reminds us that the dream does end, and we do have the means to wake up out of it.
Salvation is as sure as God. His certainty suffices. Learn that even the darkest nightmare that disturbed the mind of God's sleeping Son holds no power over him. He will learn the lesson of awakening. God watches over him and light surrounds him. [ACIM CE T-13.XII.7:6-10]
Let's quickly review that last class we talked about how it was—and still is—our choice to separate from God, and to live a dream instead of reality. Same goes from waking from the dream; It's our choice. It was our choice to enter, and it's our choice to exit.
On the path of A Course in Miracles, we have two guides in this choice: We choose either the ego as our teacher if we want the dream to perpetuate, or we choose the Holy Spirit if we want the dream to end. Everyone ultimately chooses the path of waking; it's just a matter of choosing when.
The Holy Spirit and the Ego
Before we get into our list here, this episode is focused on the Holy Spirit, but we can't talk about the Holy Spirit unless we also include the ego in this conversation. The Course calls the Holy Spirit "God's answer to the ego", or in other words, the answer to the separation or dream.
The Holy Spirit from the Course perspective was created for this very specific need to heal the split mind, and guide the sleeping Son back to wholeness and God.
So to top our list, and starting on the right hand side this time, the Holy Spirit was created by God, again as the remedy for the split. And on the other hand, on the left hand side of our list, the ego was Son-made. The Sleeping Son made the ego to do the opposite of the Holy Spirit; to keep us from waking up, to perpetuate the dream state, and keep us seemingly separated from God.
Next line down on the left: it's the thought system of the ego and separation that always enforces a split will. A split will means the mind wants authorship and autonomy of itself. We talked about this in the last video. A split will always leads to separation because that's exactly what it is: split equals separate.
Just as a side note here, the ego isn't us. The ego isn't actually a mind. The ego is more like a thought system that the Son made and then adopted as our own as we ingrained it into our minds.
Okay, moving to the right now: The Holy Spirit has a joint will with God and with the Son. The Holy Spirit is always in accord with God's will. His M.O. is in showing us how to remember our oneness or joint interest with each other as Sons, with Him and with God. The ego's M.O. is always going to be in perpetuating "splitness".
Next line: and the means the ego uses to accomplish this splitness is projection. You can think of it like an engine or machine that perpetuates itself through the fuel of guilt and sin. It makes us believe our own sin and guilt and uses projection to hurl it out onto others and the world to make it look as if what we're looking at is the perpetrator, rather than a thought system that's lurking inside our own mind.
I'm going to keep going down the left side list here because there's a progression the ego uses. The ego's use of projection is always an attack on what it wants to be outside itself. And it's always based in punishment. Projection is always going to make something separate from us to punish rather than looking at our own perceived guilt.
This is perception, right? Jumping down to the next line, nothing outside is actually based in the reality of God. We have to look away from God to perceive anything outside. And the fuel for this is our attack thoughts.
Projection leads to perception, and perception leads to projection like a pump or an engine. And if we're all participating—which we do—it's like watching those old cartoons from the seventies where two cavemen are hitting each other over the head with a log over and over. It just keeps going and no one bothers to stop or ask why.
Looking at the very bottom line here—literally and figuratively—the bottom line is that the ego wants to replace God, and the Son of God.
Remember the Course states that the Son had a thought of wanting to be God instead of having been created by God. The ego is what we made to make that wish come true. It'll keep this perception game going so that we don't actually see another way.
So let's jump up into the right now and look at how the Holy Spirit counteracts this.
He's always aligned with our joint will, again, which means He's in line or in parallel with God's will.
Instead of projection and attack, the Holy Spirit uses extension to share love. Extension is the way we share as spirit, in which what is communicated is the truth.
The natural means to lovingly counteract attack and punishment would be through forgiveness. One caveman out of the two decides to stop and say, “what exactly did this caveman in front of me actually do? Who started this? Could it have been me?”
Someone has to stop and see things differently. That's the only way the pump will stop churning the engine.
Next line down on the right: through forgiveness, the Holy Spirit gently shows us how to access a new vision that always looks for the Christ within others, the truth in others, the truth of who that person actually is. It's the exact opposite of projecting guilt through attack, that's part of a cycle that keeps us seeing only the body and the world outside us.
Last line: in this way, the Holy Spirit speaks for God and for the entire Sonship. His will is joined with ours and does not seek to replace or separate.
So let's do a very quick recap:
The Ego
The ego is made by the sleeping Son of God as a method to split the will and keep the dream of separation going.
It does this by projecting guilt and sin onto ourselves and others as an attack and punishment.
In so doing, it keeps us in a state of perception that sees only bodies and the world, in essence, trying to replace God and the Kingdom with form.
The Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit was created by God, Who has a joint will with God and the Sonship.
He's here to help us learn to extend love to others and ourselves through our forgiveness, so that we see a new vision and see the face of Christ in everyone we look upon.
In this way, He always speaks for God, and for us as the Son of God.
The Holy Spirit: The Bridge and Mediator
So let's return again to our Kingdom of Heaven symbol. A reminder again that the flower of life is not mentioned or used in the Course. I'm only using it as a teaching aid to help show the elements of the Kingdom of God.
So we've got everything represented here now. Everything gold is God, Who contains the entire Kingdom and is within the entire Kingdom.
Everything silver is the Son of God, the One and the many. The little black spots represent the sleeping Son, the dream and the ego.
And now we have everything white, which represents the Holy Spirit, Who's God's answer to the ego and the dark dream.
And just to note here on the image, the white balls of light really would reside with all the Sons of the Kingdom, not just the few shown here. The Course states that the Holy Spirit was a creation of God and is therefore eternal and within the whole. He will remain in our minds forever.
So let's go through these Course quotes at the right.
The separation was not a loss of perfection, but a failure in communication. [ACIM CE T-6.VI.6:1]
The Holy Spirit is about correcting that failure and then reestablishing that communication. The failure here being only that we blocked, or obscured, our ability to see, or better wording, to know the Kingdom.
Our perfection remains intact under this dark veil that we put there, and the Holy Spirit is tasked with the job of being the bridge and the guide for us to walk us back through the dark veil.
Next quote:
The Holy Spirit mediates between illusions and the truth. [CE W-WI.7.1:1]
So the Holy Spirit is sometimes referred to as the Mediator in the Course. He mediates between illusions and truth.
Part of this mediation has to do with showing us the truth about each other. He mediates between us by showing that bodies and sin are the illusion, and that the Christ in us is the truth. This is the path of miracles and forgiveness.
He also acts as the mediator between us and God. He continuously speaks for God and for us, as we talked about in the last slide.
Last quote:
The Holy Spirit is the bridge or thought transfer of perception to knowledge. [ACIM CE T-5.IV.1:2]
We talked about perception in the last slide, and I think we've talked about it in every video so far. In the dream of separation, we only perceive using sense faculties, even very high level faculties; the entire sensorium that goes way beyond the five physical senses.
But as we've discussed in the previous videos and in this series, only knowledge is what's shared amongst us in the Kingdom of Heaven. Ultimately, it's the Holy Spirit's role to move us slowly from perception back to pure knowledge or our natural state of being.
The Plan of Salvation
Let's talk a little bit more about the Holy Spirit's plan of salvation.
The Holy Spirit keeps the vision of Christ for every Son of God who sleeps. [ACIM CE T-12.IX.5:1]
As we've talked about in the other videos, the aspect of our mind that sleeps is the only part that needs healing. The Christ in us remains whole and the Holy Spirit keeps that vision within us.
But the dreaming self does need healing, and the Holy Spirit fulfills that function by training us to have a change of mind about being split. It's that split that needs healing, or that idea of "splitness" that needs healing.
Let's go through these bullets and get an idea of how He accomplishes that.
He does this by what I call dream reinterpretation. In essence, he turns every day and every encounter we have into a classroom with a new purpose and new learning objective.
That objective is a new vision, which is recognizing everyone as the Son of God, as the same. This means seeing everyone we think are bodies as a Holy Son of God.
You know how when we dream at night, we sometimes take an omniscient view and are watching all of the characters, including ourselves? I sometimes think of the Holy Spirit in that way throughout my day. My omniscient mind is with His omniscient Mind, and He acts as my Teacher to reinterpret the lessons I'm learning in the classroom, so to speak of my day, or my dream of my day.
When I'm aware enough throughout the day, I take a moment to have Him reinterpret the motivations of the people I interact with, and of course my behaviors in response to those interactions. In other words, I'm remembering to be awake in my dream, which is my everyday physical experience.
This is where the practice periods from the Course Workbook come in. When used throughout the day, as they should be, they really are a way for us to train our mind, to wake ourselves up in the dream.
Second to last bullet:
The Holy Spirit shows us that forgiveness is the way out of the dream. It's overlooking inevitable errors that we and others make. It's stopping the cavemen from bonking each other in the heads over and over.
Now, overlooking errors doesn't mean people won't be held responsible for behavior that's incorrect, inappropriate, aggressive, violent. Every society on the planet has rules, spoken and unspoken. Forgiveness is remembering God's Son is guiltless under all the errors and mistakes, or beyond all the errors and mistakes.
And lastly:
This quality of true forgiveness leads to miracles. Or we could say miracles lead to forgiveness. A miracle really is just another word for healing; little and big expressions of love toward each other, and listening to the Holy Spirit's reinterpretation of our dream. These help us develop our natural impulses for healing and get us "miracle ready", because we never know who may need a miracle in any moment.
Over time and through consistent practice, we allow the Holy Spirit to work through us to remove the dark veils that we and others put up between ourselves to block ourselves from the truth. Eventually all darkness is gone, and all we see is the truth of who each of us actually is. "The Holy Spirit keeps the vision of Christ for every son of God who sleeps."
We Choose Our Teacher: The Ego or the Holy Spirit
Second to last slide here, a reminder slide, suggesting again that it's we who choose our teacher here in the dream. The Holy Spirit can't step in without our willingness to choose His way. As a Son of God, we have free will and need to be the ones to make the choice for what we want.
What I'd like to focus on in this slide is the quote at the bottom:
You will identify with what you think will make you safe. Whatever it may be, you will believe that it is one with you. [ACIM CE W-WI.5.4-5]
So as nightmarish as this dream can be, we're choosing it because we perceive it to be the safe option. As long as we choose to see the ego's thought system, we'll naturally see God in the Holy Spirit as out to get us because we're looking at them through the projection lens of guilt and punishment.
The ego has all but convinced us that the ego is us. Remember, it's not us; it's just a thought system. But it wants us to think it is. And as Jesus says here in this quote, "what we identify with makes us feel safe". And so the other is going to look and feel like an attack upon us and will seem frightening. Incredibly, the ego literally makes love horrifying.
This is why forgiving people is the last thing we want to do, and it's why the Holy Spirit's plan of salvation is the hardest thing we've ever done.
It's also why the path is slow, steady, and gentle. The Holy Spirit's Way shows us the way by gradual contrast and comparison, but we have to start looking in the direction of the Holy Spirit in order to start trusting that and feeling safe in that. Eventually we learn to identify with the Holy Spirit and the plan, as we realize it truly is our will to do so.
So I want to end our entire 4-part series with this slightly longer, but pithy Course passage because it doesn't sugarcoat our situation in choosing guilt. But it also shows us that the new path with the Holy Spirit is fail-safe.
You, whose mind is darkened by doubt and guilt, remember this: God gave the Holy Spirit to you and gave Him the mission to remove all doubt and every trace of guilt that his dear Son has laid upon himself. It is impossible that this mission fail. Nothing can prevent what God would have accomplished from accomplishment. Whatever your reactions to the Holy Spirit's voice may be, whatever voice you choose to listen to, whatever strange thoughts may occur to you, God's will is done. You will find the peace in which he has established you, because He does not change His Mind. [CE T-13.XII.3]
Conclusion to ACIM Course Cosmology
And that concludes our Course Cosmology series. I hope it helped develop your understanding of the main Course characters—or in some helpful way strengthened what you already knew.
We're on this path together, and I wish you well.
Thanks for listening to the ForgiveNest Podcast.
I'm Alison Anton.
It was great talking to you.
